


Snowflakes and Stars

by inK_AddicTion



Category: Guardians of Childhood - William Joyce, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Cold gold - Freeform, Jack is a Tease, M/M, Suggestiveness, jacksandy week, my contribution to jacksandy week on tumblr, sandy is a tease
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-14
Updated: 2015-08-16
Packaged: 2018-04-14 17:29:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4573293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inK_AddicTion/pseuds/inK_AddicTion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the Jack/ Sandy week on Tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Day 4, Clothes Swap

**Author's Note:**

> This is for Day 4 of the Jack Sandy week on tumblr, the prompt being clothes swap.

There were very few things that Jack owned, and even fewer those that he had chosen for himself. He'd had to scrap the colonial clothes he'd been born as Jack Frost in after one particularly harrowing escape from a pissed off wendigo. He'd gone around stubbornly shirtless for months, mourning his destroyed clothing, until he'd found his blue hoodie, abandoned on a washing line. He'd “borrowed” it, instantly taken with the colour, exactly the same shade of the deep blue of the frozen water underneath his lake in the evenings, when the sun sank below the treetops and everything was covered in twisting shadows like scraping fingers. 

Naturally, when he woke up and it was missing, he panicked. 

He burst into an instant flurry of activity, checking everywhere around his lake. It was gone, not a curl of frost or thread of blue to be seen. Jack never took his hoodie off, never, but he must have this time. The alternative, that someone had  _ stolen  _ it off his sleeping body as he lay curled up on the centre of his lake, breathing patterns of frost over the thick, permanent ice, was too horrifying to consider.

However, after checking every rock and tree branch for a mile radius, and sneakily visiting Burgess to check Jamie's room, Jack was forced to accept that a nefarious someone had stolen his hoodie.

He clenched his fist so hard the wood of his staff creaked.  _ This meant war. _

But first, he had to call upon some recruits. It was time to summon the other Guardians.

Bunny was just amused when Jack declared his intent to wage war upon the entire spirit world until he found the thief, and suggested that he go “cool off.” Jack hadn't appreciated the amusement or the pun, and had retaliated by freezing Bunny's dye river solid.

After being chased out of the Warren by an infuriated rabbit, he went to North, who rather crossly told him he only had one hundred and thirty two days, four hours and eighteen minutes left until Christmas, he simply didn't have  _ time  _ to help Jack. So Jack went to Tooth, who went bright pink and fell out of the sky upon seeing his very pale white chest, just as gleaming as his teeth, (It was difficult to get a tan, being a winter spirit) knocking herself out on a pillar and narrowly avoiding severely broken bones by Jack catching her. He followed the directions of the fairies and put her in her room.

Well, thought Jack, if North was too busy, Tooth too unfocused, and Bunny too cruel to help him, he'd just have to go ask Sandy. If he could find him.

Goal in mind, Jack set off, surfing blasts of freezing cold air whilst bitterly thinking of his poor hoodie. Who knew what was happening to it, without Jack there to keep it safe. He hoped he could find Sandy soon.

Oddly enough, bright golden sand against a dark sky was rather glaringly obvious, and Jack grinned as he spotted Sandy from several miles away. As he drew closer, however, and Sandy's small figure did not become clear, Jack frowned. Sandy's beautiful bright dreamsand lit up the sky, and his robe was bright as any star, leaving him easily discernible atop his shifting sand cloud. Nonetheless, as he grew closer, all Jack could see was a single patch of dimness in the centre of all that shining heat, exactly where Sandy should be. 

As he drew closer, however, his confusion and slight worry turned abruptly into outrage.

The reason Sandy wasn't glowing as brightly was because he wasn't wearing his robe.  _ He was wearing Jack's hoodie.  _

“ _SANDMAN!”_ Jack shrieked, slicing through the air like an avenging angel of iciness and death, his staff pointed at the other Guardian, who jumped and yelped (soundlessly) as Jack slammed into him and knocked him from the sky.

Luckily, they weren't far up from the ground, and Jack automatically created a snowdrift for them to plough into instead of the asphalt. He was angry, not murderous, he'd had quite enough of Sandy dying without the need to crack his skull open on the road. Stunned from both the fall and the unexpected visit, Sandy looked up at him with very wide, slightly terrified eyes, though he blushed bright orange when Jack pinned his small hands to the snow and loomed over him, brows drawing into a dark frown.

“ _You_ stole  _ my hoodie,”  _ Jack hissed, bringing his face close enough to Sandy's that he could count the starburst freckles over his golden cheeks, feel his hot breath panting against Jack's lips. Sandy bit his lip, hard enough Jack could tell he would leave imprints, and he leaned his head back, pressing back against the snow to put more space between them. He was flushing so brightly it was almost painful to look at, breathing quickly and golden eyes hooded. He licked his lips, once, his eyes darted to Jack's chest and then back up to his lips. His chest heaved.

“Sandy?” Jack leaned back, puzzled. “Are you okay, little man? You look a little...flushed.”

Sandy smiled too wide and nodded vigorously, his eyes drifting away from Jack's face again before snapping back up again, blushing even harder than before.

“Are you sick?” said Jack in concern. Perhaps Sandy had stolen Jack's hoodie because he couldn't keep his sand together, judging by the way his symbols were stuttering and tripping over themselves now, shaking grains of sand falling back onto the cool white expanse of the snow around his glittering hair like tiny golden jewels. 

Sandy shook his head. His wild spikes of hair fanned out against the snow like a halo, but his expression was anything but angelic when he looked at Jack again, a hint of a dark golden tongue darting out to wet his lips. He looked like a starving man before a feast.

Jack's mouth formed a perfect 'O' as suddenly the realisation came upon him, and though his cheeks immediately chilled with mortification he couldn't help but grin.

“Sandy, if you wanted to see me shirtless, you really only had to ask.”

 


	2. Day Two, Stargazing

_Day 2, Stargazing_

Jack would be hard pressed to say what he loves about Sandy the most. There's just so much of him to love, even if that's not quite true in the physical sense. (Jack uses the term 'funsize'.) Sandy is an eclectic, bizarre creature; Jack never knows what version of the Sandman he's going to meet the next time he drops by on Sandy's dreamcloud.

Sometimes Sandy is silent, dark, mired in the past with the powerful, dangerous aura of an approaching storm. Even at his deepest, most lost, unknowable secrets and the weight of a fallen empire on his shoulders, he still finds a way to fight his way through the melancholy to give Jack a hard-won smile. It is soft and tainted with sadness but somehow all the more beautiful for it. These depressions are lonely, awful things, things that leave Sandy unmoving and lethargic, his glittering dreamsand dull and dark, but Jack knows if he drops his staff and curls up around Sandy, trying to fold his softness into Jack's bony angles, Sandy will sometimes lean his head against Jack's shoulder, sigh as if Jack had smoothed some roughshod broken part of him into place. Jack will hold him close and feel his wintry heart fill with so much love for him he doesn't know how to express, so instead he holds him very tightly and wishes as fiercely as he can that Sandy will feel all that sharp bright love somewhere.

Sometimes he is incandescent, shining brighter than twelve suns and ecstatic, grinning ear to ear with simple joy that makes Jack's centre sing. Ready for anything, a smirk of gold against pale snow, teasing and mischievous and initiating breathless races that end in kisses that taste like laughter and light. It can be difficult to make sense of him then, reckless and full of cocky daring, burning through passion like a match struck over gasoline. Jack is able to keep up, but every time he can't shake the fear that Sandy will whirl into some supernova of effulgent fire, too hot and fierce for icy Jack to follow.

Those moods are as short-lived as they are rapturous in intensity, and Sandy will mellow to something rich and luxuriant, lazy summer heat and the curl of an indolent smirk. The soft buttery yellow of his skin feels like superheated silk covered in scattered grains, and his kiss is slow, controlled, designed to make Jack breathless in a wet heap of melted snow, a purposeful and deliberate thawing scrawling burns of relaxed lust over skin too pale and white, dusted with ice crystals. He loves taking Jack apart, leaving him helpless under the full-force of Sandy's attention, all that strength, all that heat and heart and the slow turn of an ancient mind older than the earth and twice as wise. Jack never stands a chance of keeping any coherency, finds he doesn't care. It's nice, having someone cage in the sky-free fractals that make him up, keep him from flying apart under his own energy.

Sandy seems to change and evolve daily, the only constant being how he brightens in Jack's presence, the symbols that slide to life in a vivid theatre of graceful arcs that Jack never gets tired of watching, even if he only understands one word in six. It's okay, though, he tells himself. He has the rest of his life to practise and the promise Sandy repeats every time Jack leaves, _I'll come back, you won't be alone, I'm not going anywhere._

Perhaps that's why Jack can never get enough of cataloguing his every expression, the slight crease of a frown when a dream won't form, the orange blush when Jack compliments him, the shine of smugness in his eyes when his retaliatory kiss leaves Jack wordless. Perhaps despite everything, becoming a Guardian, open invitations to four new friends' homes, people that look out for him, and an attentive, loyal lover who takes care to find him at least once every three or four days, who puts up with Jack constantly doubting him, his love, pushing him as hard as he could to test whether he _really_ means it and holds him close, signing again and again _I love you, I'll come back_ , he still can't accept he isn't alone anymore.

Three centuries never sound long, when it is compared to how long the other Guardians have existed, and he is with people now, isn't he? He has it all, really. But those years were his formative years, the years where an innocent child rose from the ice and learned to accept and believe that he was destined to be alone, ignored, and disregarded even by those who could see him, just another icy pest. He knows it's silly, that he still can't shake this fear of abandonment, that he still hesitates when he sees that familiar golden dream cloud – what if this time, Sandy doesn't want to see him, he's too busy, found someone better, more interesting, less _annoying?_ He can't stop staring at Sandy like he expects him to disappear, can't stop a starved part of him squireling each shred of smile and happiness and warmth down in some cold place inside, as if it's the last time, as a guard against the loneliness and solitude he expects to come.

Jack's favourite thing to do is lie beside Sandy on the shores of the isle of Sleepy Sands, a hot dry palm sliding against his, a small warm body nestled against Jack, not a hint of distaste where Jack's body is skinny and cold instead of soft, giving, perfect to embrace like Sandy.

He likes doing everything with Sandy, but those quiet moments when Sandy looks up at the canvas of the night sky overhead, the brilliant points of stars punctuating the rippling black sheet are the best. He always feels too embarrassed to stare as openly as he wants, but these moments are a tacit, unvoiced permission, and Jack seizes them eagerly. Sandy looks up, so Jack is free to memorise the curve of his lips, the sweep of his lashes against his golden cheeks, the airy spikes of his soft hair. Sandy is beautiful, every part of him, and Jack never feels luckier even through all the quiet doubt.

Sandy looks up to the past, and tells stories without a sound. Sometimes Jack watches, enrapt, silent recollections of people Sandy has known, ancient civilisations long since passed into dust.

Sometimes he doesn't, cheek against the sand and a smile on his lips, just watching Sandy. When Sandy invariably notices his staring, Jack drinks in the sight of the teasing quirk to his lips, the symbols that ask, in a flurry of sand slow enough for Jack to read, _“Why do you never watch the stars?”_

For a moment, Jack debates saying it, but the possibility of the face Sandy would make is worth the embarrassment of sounding mushy. _“_ Why would I need to look up when I have the perfect star to gaze at right in front of me?”

Interesting, he's never seen Sandy go _that_ shade of orange before.  


End file.
